The Birth of a Nation (1915)
premiered 8th February 1915
Cast:
Lillian Gish
Mae Marsh
Henry B. Walthall
Miriam Cooper
Mary Alden
Ralph Lewis
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Period Drama, War
195m
David W. Griffith Corporation
Director:
D. W. Griffith
Writer:
D. W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods
"The Supreme Picture of All Time"
Part 1: Preparing The Birth of a Nation
While making his first films for Mutual in California in the spring of 1914, D.W. Griffith asked a select few of his actors to stay behind at the end of the day’s shoot. After swearing everyone at this informal gathering to secrecy, he told them he had purchased the rights to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, which, as Lillian Gish recalled in her autobiography, he planned to use to “tell the truth about the War between the States.”
The Clansman was the second work in a trilogy – the others being The Leopard’s Spots and The Traitor – which told the story of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective. Dixon adapted the controversial novel – which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroes – into a stage play in 1905.
Griffith had tasked Frank Woods and his assistant Russell E. Smith with finding suitable material for filming. It was Woods who suggested Dixon’s play. The stage production of The Clansman had enjoyed modest success, meaning the price to purchase its film rights would be within Mutual’s reach. It was also material with a powerful appeal for a Southern-born gentleman like Griffith. The son of Kentucky state legislator “Roaring Jake” Griffith, a former Confederate army colonel who fought in the Civil War, Griffith had sat at his father’s knee as a small boy, held in thrall by his booming voice as he recounted stirring tales of ‘the lost cause,’ romantic days of the antebellum South and the Reconstruction period of Northern injustice and ‘black misrule’ that followed the South’s defeat.
While much in The Clansman echoed Griffith’s own inherited beliefs about the war and its aftermath, it also provided the opportunity for sweeping, large-scale scenes charged with emotion: fierce Civil War battles, Reconstruction riots and the white-clad Klan riding to the rescue. He felt sure such grand scenarios would facilitate his desire to progress film towards epic, grandiose feature-length storytelling. The Civil War shorts Griffith had made for Biograph had all been successful, and as The Clansman had already known success in print and on the stage, he was sure it would have a built-in audience.
After much persuading, Harry Aitken gave Griffith’s ‘superpicture’ the green light, with a budget of $40,000 – four times the budget for a regular five-reeler. To Aitken’s dismay, the boards of both Majestic and Reliance voted against financing such a risky venture. While he and his brother Roy approached any wealthy individuals they believed had the stomach to invest in Griffith’s picture, the director began renting land for the film’s epic battle scenes and ordering costumes and props. If this was a ploy to keep the brothers committed, it worked: they even invested some of their own money to reach the target.
Dixon, a canny negotiator, had demanded $25,000 for the rights to his play. But just as Griffith was pressuring Harry Aitken for money for expenses, Dixon withdrew his original demand of the money in advance, stating he would settle for an immediate payment of $2,000 to settle pressing obligations. His demand for a 25% share of the picture’s profits remained unchanged.
D. W. Griffith
Henry B. Walthall in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Griffith began rehearsals for The Clansman in May 1914 shortly before finishing The Avenging Conscience. He developed no shooting script for the film. “We wrote no script,” Griffith said. “I never did for any of my pictures. We would get the idea of the story, carry it around with us; eat over it; walk over it; drink over it; dream over it until every action and scene was catalogued in our minds. Then we would start rehearsing.” Gish recalled noticing the director’s pockets stuffed with papers and pamphlets a few days before he had pulled his cast members aside to reveal his big plan.
Rehearsals were well underway before Griffith made his final casting decisions, although few were in doubt over who he would cast in the lead role of Ben Cameron, the ‘little colonel’. Henry Walthall may have been a little too old for the part – and far too fond of the bottle – but Griffith felt he could disguise the actor’s age by dressing him in wide-brim hats to soften the light on his face. Gish expected Griffith to choose Blanche Sweet for Walthall’s romantic partner, Elsie Stoneman. But when Sweet missed a rehearsal, he had Gish play the part in the scene in which Silas Lynch tries to force her into wedlock with him. Griffith was taken by her performance, and by the way her blonde hair, loosened from its hairpins, trailed around her face. Gish’s slight frame also suggested a vulnerability Miss Sweet’s fuller figure lacked. That Griffith was interested in Gish on a personal level may have also influenced his decision…
Griffith cast Ralph Lewis as Gish’s father, Austin Stoneman, abolitionist leader and the ‘uncrowned king of Capitol Hill.’ Stoneman was based on Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party of the 1860s. Elmer Clifton and Bobby Harron played Stoneman’s sons. The white actor (and Griffith’s chief assistant) George Siegmann played Silas Lynch, Stoneman’s treacherous black protégé (white actors in blackface played all the main black characters in the film, a common – and regrettable – practice in early Hollywood).
With production about to begin, Griffith demanded more money from the cash-strapped Aitken. Props and costumes were arriving at the studio daily, and sets were being built. Frank ‘Huck’ Wortman and his carpenters were erecting an antebellum town complete with slave quarters on leased land across from the Kinemacolor studio in Los Angeles. The Camerons’ house on Piedmont Street was built on the studio lot, its picket fence built in hinged sections that could be stored and re-used. Grass mats were made of raffia and burlap, flowers of cloth mounted on steel spikes. A cheap reprint of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War provided the detail required for the crew to construct from cheap plywood meticulous reproductions of gun carriages and cannons. All this cost money.
Harry Aitken and his brother raised another $25,000 by pledging percentages of their own wages plus any stock in their businesses not already providing collateral on other loans. No sooner had Majestic found the money to forward to Griffith than he was requesting a further $15,000 they had promised him. Again, they stayed true to their word and somehow raised the money.
At last, Griffith was ready to film his magnum opus.
Please click the "Next Film" button for Part 2 of this article.
Sources: D. W. Griffith’s Film, The Birth of a Nation: The Film that Transformed America, Michael R. Hurwitz; D. W. Griffith: An American Life, Richard Schickel; Adventures with D. W. Griffith, Karl Brown; D. W. Griffith: American Film Master, Iris Barry; Billy Bitzer; his story, Billy Bitzer; Lillian Gish: the Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, Lillian Gish; D. W. Griffith: his Life and Work, Robert M. Henderson; A Silent Siren Song: the Aitken Brothers’ Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, Al P. Nelson; D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Melvyn Stokes; The Birth of a Nation, Paul McEwan.